Plenty of MPs hate their jobs

Full coverage of UK politicsAndy Sparrow, who knows a thing or two about politicians, is brought up sharp by the revelation that the recently deceased John MacDougall didn't like being an MP. "It's easy to assume Parliament houses 646 men and women who are all obsessed with ambition and determined to cling to their seats at all costs. It's healthy to be reminded that, just occasionally, that's not true," he writes on his Guardian blog.

You rarely see this pointed out, but one of the most common feelings among new MPs (or councillors or, indeed, MEPs) is astonishment at their powerlessness. Before they are elected, candidates tend to believe that MPs run the country. When they get to Westminster, they realise that Britain is in fact run by a standing apparat of quangoes, human rights judges and Eurocrats. An MP has far less impact on the lives of his constituents than have, say, the NICE, the Local Education Authority, the Learning and Skills Council, the Health and Safety Executive, the Child Support Agency – or, indeed, the most powerful quango of the lot, the European Commission.

The trouble is that the MPs' constituents still labour under the misapprehension that he is, in some sense, in charge. They blame him when things go wrong. He has responsibility without power.

By the time he realises how irrelevant he is, another grisly truth is dawning: there is no going back. A stretch in Westminster has made him all but unemployable: 80 per cent of ex-MPs are still without work a year after losing their seats. Forget the idea that MPs can walk into directorships, by the way. The era when companies thought that a parliamentarian on their board would lend them respectability is long past. These days, placing "MP" after your name is tantamount to an admission of corruption.

Most MPs understandably start sucking up to their Whips. They don't need to worry so much about their constituents: three quarters of seats are safe. Faced with a choice between voting against their electors' interests and displeasing their party leader (and thereby risking their right to stand in their party's interest again), they rationally choose the former.

In any case, with other career options closed off, the only way for an MP to advance (and get a pay-rise) is to become a minister. And so, with almost every backbencher aspiring to become a front bencher, Parliament fails in its primary role, namely to hold the Government to account.

Can anything be done about it? Yes: open primaries, referendums and, above all, a shift in power from the executive and judicial branches of government back to the legislative branch. Ah, but how to effect these changes? You'll have to wait for my book, due out next month.